Reddit is down for thousands of users across the United States and in some parts of Europe, according to Down Detector . Initial reports started pouring in on Twitter as users took to the social media platform to wonder if they were the only ones experiencing an outage. Major cities, including New York, London, and Toronto, seem to have the highest level of outages.
Users heading to reddit.com are experiencing severely slow load times. Some people are unable to load the site at all, with the page eventually timing out. Many users are reporting a “504 Gateway Timeout.” Any 5xx error is defined as a server-level issue. A 504 error specifically means that a server has not received a timely response from another server it is attempting to access while trying to load a given webpage or fulfill another task from the browser.
If you are trying to access the site, you may see something like this:
While most people are simply reporting the errors they’re seeing, others are using the opportunity to make some reddit-oriented jokes.
“Just posted my picture to r/roastme and after that it crashed. Was it really that bad you had to take your site down?” one person commented on Down Detector’s site.
“No reddit, so let’s just continue our /r/*threads* here for now,” suggested another.
Another person decided to start their very own thread on Down Detector, asking folks what their favorite book is.
Redditors have designed their own reddit-centric activity for dealing with downtime, which of course has its own subreddit: downtime bananas. The term is self-explanatory: users draw bananas when the website is down and share them when it comes back online.
The good news is that these 5xx-level errors usually wrap up quickly. Some people are already back on their favorite subs. Of course, there’s already a chance that reddit will have additional server issues throughout the day. When Facebook and Instagram have similar issues, the sites can be unsteady for several hours until things shake out.
Reddit, which bills itself as “the front page of the internet,” is a collection of small sub-communities tailored toward innumerable specific interests. Users are able to share links and post “self-posts” for discussion within each community, depending on the subreddit’s rules, as determined by its community moderators. On the whole, reddit functions as a social medium and news aggregator, combining elements of classic internet message boards, all within a customizable space.
